This week’s worst youtube real estate video is a luxury apartment in Singapore’s Orchard Residences. All in all, not the absolute worst real estate video we have featured. It is short, to the point and thank goodness - whoever shot it took my advice and bought themselves a tripod.

With a mechanical pan facility judging from the incredibly annoying tick, whirr, tick, click of the mechanism which is the only sound on this video. How hard can it be to find and add a suitable soundtrack?

At least it is not a slide show

After deciding which sites are appropriate for you, the next thing to do is be active on those sites. And I don’t mean spend 12 hours a day on the ‘net, just some activity. To all those I hear muttering, “But I don’t have time,” - Find some time. There is no rule that says you must have a website, or that you must spend time social networking on these sites, but if you have decided you are going to have a web presence - then have a web presence.

I am constantly amazed at the amount of people I interact with on these sites, and what a waste of time most of this interaction is. I will give a for instance. I am a member of facebook and this is a link to my profile there - Mark Knowles on facebook.

At facebook, I joined a real estate bloggers group, thinking I would find a great group of real estate bloggers to network with After a little wandering through this group’s activities, I slowly came to the conclusuion that there were no bloggers there - the thing is chock-a-block full of advertisements for property for sale and “investment opportunities in Pakistan.”

In frustration, I posted a message to their wall which basically said:

Hellooooooo ! (echo, echo, echo) Are there any actual real estate bloggers here because I want to do some networking with you? I’m a really cool guy and I run a very high quality luxury real estate blog and can send some great links your way. (I am nothing if not modest)

751 members. Guess how many responses?

One!

That is correct - one single, solitary response.

The person who responded is Suzanne Grace, of Grace & Associates, a real estate agent in Thousand Oaks who sells real estate in California. This the welcome message on her website:

We are Grace & Associates, YOUR Real Estate Agents for REAL Life, and we LOVE helping YOU with all of YOUR Real Estate needs… the opportunity to help the first-time buyer buy that first home, the family relocating to their next home or helping a seller get the most money, the quickest sale, all with relative ease, gives us a great deal of satisfaction!

So, if you are wondering how to use social networking sites to drive traffic and links to your real estate blog or website, this is a good example. Just by responding to a simple question and saying hello in a friendly fashion, Suzanne now has a high quality backlink using fantastic anchor text from a high page-rank, authority real estate blog to her website

It may not pay off today, or even tomorrow, but some when in the future, this link will either send a visitor or cause the search engines to rank her page just a little higher when some one is looking for real estate in California and bingo ! Worth the time?

I have begged for and been given ten tickets to the upcoming soiree at the Zen Mansion in Denver, Colorado and have offered them to various luxury agents I have an online relationship with.

Only one person has taken me up on the offer so far. This is the flyer for the event. Ignore the recommended cover charge – these are freebies from me.

So, seriously – if there are any luxury real estate agents in the Denver, Colorado area interested in what has to be one of the best networking opportunities in luxury real estate marketing – for free ! Drop me a line, Mark Knowles or call 877-LUX-SOIREE and tell them Mark sent you.

And just a few little details left out – such as where exactly this house is, how much it costs or who is selling it. The kind of details you might think were worth including on a “Treasure Lake Real Estate Homes For Sale,” video. No attempt has been made to do anything with this video. Not even a sound track added.
Which actually brings me to another question about real estate videos posted to youtube. I did find a few recently with what I consider to be good backing music. But then I had a thought – Who owns that music? Did the real estate agent go to the trouble of asking and paying for permission to use a piece of music by Sting, for instance? I wonder if Mr. Sting knows his music is being used to sell a million-dollar plus home? I wonder if he wants a cut? Knowing Sting, I suspect the answer is yes.

I also love these two guys – they are sooooo bad, they are funny. Does sex sell real estate? Silly question really.

Photo Credit - Anthony Dimaano/ The Bulletin

Faced with falling interest in some of the million dollar properties listed, realtor Sophie Bielefeld invited local agents who specialize in houses priced at over a million dollars to join her “luxury property network.”

The group meets once a month to discuss ways of creating interest in their listings, and although no sales have resulted from the network just yet, Ms. Bielefeld, who is also a property developer seems hopeful. “The Bend Bulletin,” a central-Oregon-based online newspaper reports:

The number of luxury homes or properties worth $1 million or more has increased in Central Oregon in the past decade due to rising property values, rising construction costs and demand from new residents and second-home owners, Bielefeld said.

It’s not just sprawling homes or 10-acre properties with spectacular mountain views that are rising in value, however. Bielefeld said the cost of land in some areas has risen so much that even large homes without luxury upgrades may reach $1 million in valuation by the time construction concludes.

Bielefeld said there are approximately 165 properties on the Central Oregon Multiple Listing Service for homes, or homes with acreage, worth $1 million or more. Sales of those homes jumped in 2004 during the housing boom and reached a high of 95 last year, according to the Central Oregon Association of Realtors.

According to a report published by the Bratton Appraisal Group, based in Bend, there are currently 104 single family homes priced at more than $1 million in Bend. Based on sales over the previous year, this equates to a thirty month supply. Six months’ supply is considered normal.

The Luxury Property Network has a blog here. It’s just a pity they are not based in Arkansas. The Luxury property in Arkansas domain name is still available.

Italian businessman, Valter Mainetti has confirmed that his company, the Sorgente Group, has acquired a majority share of Manhattan’s historic Flatiron building (53% I understand.)

The Flatiron Building was designed by Chicago’s Daniel Burnham in the Beaux-Arts style and was one of the tallest buildings in New York when it was completed in 1902. Originally called the Fuller building, its limestone and glazed terra-cotta façade is separated into three parts horizontally. Since it was one of the first buildings to use a steel skeleton, the building could be constructed to 285 feet (87 m), which would have been very difficult with other construction methods of that time.

At the rounded tip, the triangular tower is only 6.5 feet (2 meters) wide. The 22-story building, with a height of 285 ft (87 meters), is often considered the oldest surviving skyscraper in Manhattan, though in fact the Park Row Building (1899) is both older and taller.

New York’s Flatiron Building is not the first building of its type. It is the third building in the flatiron shape, with the first being the Gooderham Building of Toronto, built in 1892, and the second in Atlanta in 1897. Both of which are smaller than their New York counterpart. If it’s in NY it better be big.

We certainly wonder how much of the top-end U.S. real estate will remain in American hands with the current state of the dollar. Foreign purchases of iconic U.S. buildings over the last few years include the Rockefeller center and Essex House. According to “Real Estate Alert,” foreign companies were the buyers in four of the top 13 U.S. commercial real estate deals in 2007.

It certainly makes sense to market properties to buyers with money to spend and the only real question is whether you should be learning to speak Arabic, Russian or Italian first?

So, let us assume you have decided you need a blog, and have also decided that you wish to host it yourself on your own domain name. This actually makes the most sense. It is a little more work than one of the free options I wrote about last time:

You need a blog to get ahead in real estate marketing

So why would you choose to host your own blog rather than use a free one and what is the best way to go about doing so?

It offers almost total control and much more importantly – allows you to carefully select some of the keywords you will want to target. This site for instance-

Luxury Property .com

Any guesses as to some of the keywords we wish to attract? Silly question but when considering a domain name for your blog, vital. So, let’s say you are a luxury property agent in Little Rock, Arkansas.

A quick search at who.is.com tells me that the domain name luxurypropertyarkansas.com is available. You can take it from me that if you are wanting to target the keyphrase “Luxury Property in Arkansas,” this is a good starting point, and if I was a luxury real estate agent in Arkansas, I would be snapping up this domain at the bargain price of $5.99

Luxuryrealestatearkansas is taken by the way. But it is a dead site and I suspect for sale if anyone is interested.

Do not be persuaded to buy any of the other domains such as .biz, .net, .org, .anythingbutcom. They are available for a reason. Only buy them to prevent others from doing so or to redirect to your main .com domain.

So, let us now assume you have decided on a domain name and it is available. The next step is to buy the domain. Nothing could be easier. I usually use godaddy and it is a matter of a few mouse clicks and giving them your details and credit card.

Now you have your domain and the next step is to buy some hosting. I use bluehost.com for my own domains, but there are no shortage of hosting companies.

The other thing I recommend is to buy the domain from one supplier, but host it at a different company. That is why I buy them from godaddy but host them at bluehost. Just in case.

Next step is to transfer the domain to your hosting company. This varies from company to company, but is, once again a matter of a few mouse clicks. Instructions will be found on whichever hosting company you have chosen’s FAQ page.

Now the fun starts……… to be continued. And if anyone wants to buy luxurypropertyarkansas, I will happily talk you through the process. Leave me a comment.

One interesting company I came across recently, Luxury WalkThru, capture all their video content in High Definition, using solid state recording.

They believe Blu-ray discs will soon be the industry standard, and offer the option of full quality Blu-ray discs alongside the lesser quality DVDs.

This is an example of their work:

I haven’t yet seen this on a wide screen plasma TV, but I understand there is no loss of picture quality using the Blu-ray version. It sure beats the typical YouTube slideshow into submission.

The real question for the real estate agent, of course, is how to deal with an affluent client’s expectations of the type of quality one might expect from a real estate video. Clearly, it is possible to offer the highest definition (without breaking the bank) and as Hi-Definition TV becomes more widespread, it is not unrealistic that clients will expect Hi-Definition videos of their property for sale.

Luxury walkthrough are one of a number of emerging companies offering the highest quality available and according to their marketing:

HD video has arrived. With the HD format war officially over Blu-Ray content is becoming ubiquitous. The luxury crowd expect High Definition content. Each and every one of our productions is filmed in full raster 1920×1080 HD.

Blu-ray is not the same as HD-DVD and there are some major differences between the two. Because Blu-ray utilizes a lens with a greater numerical aperture (NA) than HD-DVD, the laser spot can be focused with greater precision to fit more data on the same size disc. This allows Blu-ray to hold 25GB per layer (50GB on a dual-layer disc), whereas HD-DVD can only hold 15GB per layer (30GB on a dual-layer disc). Blu-ray has also adopted a higher data transfer rate for video and audio (54Mbps vs 36.55Mbps). The greater capacity and data transfer rates for Blu-ray will allow the movie studios to release their movies with higher quality video and audio than the HD-DVD format.

I am not sure I agree that Blu-ray will ultimately be the dominant format – I lived through the 80’s and watched the clearly superior Betamax lose out to the VHS format, so there are other factors other than straight-out quality that will determine which format emerges supreme. But now go take a look at some of the horrible real estate videos I am collecting from YouTube and see which one your next client is likely to want.

If you are interested in more information regarding the technical specifications of Blu-ray, the official website is here.

If any luxury real estate agents out there are kicking themselves for not getting involved in the sale of property in Dubai, the latest news from “Dubai Properties” may be another reminder that there are still opportunities in Dubai. The building is an 8-story, mixed use building offering 11,754 sq. meters of commercial space, 2,116 sq. meters of residential space, with plans for 17 retail outlets, 53 offices, and 17 one-bedroom apartments.

The record achievement follows Dubai Properties’ successful sale of other floors and units of the same and of several other projects since Cityscape Dubai in 2007, the region’s largest regional business-to-business property investment and development event.

The remaining buildings within the five million square feet “new-age community project” (not sure what that is supposed to mean) will be listed for sale throughout 2008.

Bay Square will eventually comprise thirteen mixed use buildings, including a boutique hotel with a ‘downtown setting’ and a residential tower. The remaining eleven buildings will include mixed-use projects featuring commercial and retail space, terraced apartments and two stories of rooftop apartments.

Bay Square will also be a pedestrian-only zone,  and the development is scheduled for completion by end-2009.

Atlantis (Palm Island), Dubai, 10-11 November 2008

Following the launch of the Russia Investment Roadshow in London in April 2008, in the first of a series of events in international financial centers, the Roadshow will move to Dubai in November 2008, for an intensive, interactive event focusing on investment opportunities in Russia and on the continuing growth of Russian investment abroad. With Dubai’s increasingly prominent role as a global investment hub, and with ever strengthening commercial links between the UAE and Russia, the time seems right for the Russia Investment Roadshow to visit Dubai..

The Russia Investment Roadshow will include industry CEOs, bankers, investors, journalists and other opinion formers from Russia, Dubai and all around the world. The centerpiece of the Roadshow will be a two-day conference presenting an in-depth look at the Russian business landscape and its links to Dubai and other global marketplaces. In addition to the conference the Roadshow will comprise the Russian Rhapsody VIP charity gala dinner, the Moscow Motion After Party and a special dinner event for the finance community, the Bull & Bear Banquet.

Dubai has built a dynamic economy founded on trade, manufacturing and financial services in addition to revenues from petroleum and natural gas and is becoming the driving force behind the United Arab Emirates economy. In recent years, Dubai has attracted world-wide attention through innovative real estate projects and sports events. This increased attention has further fuelled its emergence as a world business center.

If you are interested in obtaining tickets for this show, the RUSS!A investment roadshow website is here.